Tending to Virginia (3 page)

“You might,” he said and shook his head. “I wish you’d get off the divorce thing; it’s not like that’s all I’ll be doing. I mean people get divorced and occasionally I’ll probably be handling one. Somebody has to do it.”

“Somebody has to collect trash,” she said and drew that long serpent tongue out further than she’d intended. “Why don’t you do that? You can start with your first wife.” Eat this fly, and she dabbed a blob of black just short of the tongue. She watched him leaning there, his eyes staring into a borrowed crib, blankets and tiny quilts that Gram had made years ago, stacked there. His shoulders curved forward, head shaking slowly.

“Look,” he said. “I never lied to you about being divorced. You knew from the very beginning. You’re the one that wanted to keep it a secret from your family. I’m not ashamed that I made a mistake.”

“But I didn’t know you had other secrets,” she said, glancing
away from his stare. “I was afraid my family might get the wrong idea about you if I told them in the very beginning.”

“And what’s the excuse now?”

“Because now, I see that I had the wrong idea about you,” she said. “I mean, divorce I could handle; I lived with someone. I almost got married myself. You told me your divorce was mutual, a joint mistake.”

“And I should have left it at that,” he said. “I never should have tried to explain. I just wish you could leave it back where it belongs.”

“Leave it?” She painted spiky hair on the camel’s hump because that’s how it really is, not soft like a stuffed one but sharp and coarse, a thin bony face with bared teeth. “You lied to me. You said you were both so unhappy, both wanted out. You saved the other part; you didn’t want out. Let me get big as a horse and then tell me all about it. If Sheila hadn’t gotten an abortion, if Sheila hadn’t made that big decision, you would have stayed with her.”

“Yes,” he said, still staring in the crib. “But I knew it wouldn’t have worked. It would not have worked.”

“But you cared enough to try,” she said, bending her knees to reach another brush. “I don’t know why you felt the sudden urge to confess unless it’s that now I’m well beyond the point of Sheila’s decision. I mean, I have no choice. Here’s your baby.” She stood and patted her stomach, paint from the brush dripping to the floor. “After all these years, here’s your baby.”

“What do you want, Virginia? Would it make you feel better if I was the kind of person who didn’t take marriage seriously, the kind who would look at his wife and say, ‘sure, get an abortion, I don’t care.’”

“I don’t like being the substitute. At least before I didn’t know that I was just filling in where Sheila decided to spread her wings and fly away.”

“I shouldn’t have said anything, or I should have said everything sooner, I realize that now.” He stepped closer, his voice attempting softness. “I just wanted you to know how important it all is to me, how very lucky I feel. I guess I wanted to be reassured that you feel that way, too.”

“Yeah.” Give that rhino a long sharp blood-spearing horn. “It’s on your mind, been on your mind since you got that offer in Richmond—home to Richmond, Sheila’s hometown. She might even decide to move back there one day, you know?”

“She might,” he said with an edge like she might be a child, like she might be a sixth grader putting papier-mâché on a balloon. “And then, she probably won’t; she lives in New York, has for years, married. She might even have a child.”

“Might even have a child, well.” She stood, her hands pressing the small of her back, every ounce of blood draining to those puffy flounder-looking feet. “What do you mean might? You know. You keep in touch with some of the same old friends. You hear everything about Sheila and I guarantee she hears what she wants to hear about you.”

“Okay, she has a child. She’s an interior designer, married to a banker. I can probably find out more information if you need it.” He slapped his hand against the side of the crib, a little stack of blankets falling to the side. “Can’t we leave it alone? Please?”

“I can. I had forgotten all about Sheila. You’re the one that started feeling like your life was repeating itself, started questioning. Ask me if I’m sure that I want a baby. Look at me! Come touch it now.” She watched the paint make another drop on the floor. “I mean it’s a little late to change my mind.” She started a big black cloud in the corner just above that elephant’s eye. He never asked her questions about how she almost married Bryan Parker; he said it was in the past and didn’t matter. No damn wonder. It was a part of her life wasn’t it? “I don’t even know why you married me,” she said, attempting to choke back whatever emotion was rising in her throat. “Except to have a baby, somebody to work so there would be a salary and health insurance so that this baby could be born in a hospital instead of the backyard.”

“Might as well be the backyard if that’s what he’s going to grow up looking at.” He pointed at her vulture circling the sky. “I mean look, a vulture? A
vulture
in a baby’s room?” She reached up, magenta, a drop of magenta on the vulture’s beak. “Oh, that’s good,” he said. “How about a carcass? A collie’s maybe? Let’s put Lassie’s
skeleton right here.” And he pointed to the olive-green swamp where the alligators live. “How about a big bulge in the snake here and then you can tell all about how snakes eat rabbits, little bunnies like the Easter Bunny, and the Lord God made them all.”

“This vulture up here is your daddy,” she said in a storytelling voice. “And this is you.” She dotted a dot of brown in the swamp. “You are the little baby parasite here in the water.”

“Good,” he said. “Funny.”

“It’s a shame you didn’t handle your own divorce,” she said. “Maybe Sheila would have paid alimony.”

“Maybe I’ll handle ours,” he said and she had not turned from the jungle until she heard the front door slam and the car crank and she outlined a fat pregnant monkey and started crying. She had faked sleep when he came back, crawling up beside her, whispered murmurs of sorry and love and everything will be fine, all of the things that she wanted to hear and believe. And just like this morning, she wanted to turn and say it all back to him, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t pretend nothing had happened.

Virginia goes and plugs in the Mr. Coffee, her mind still on last night, still on the night a month ago when Mark, in the darkness when she was almost asleep, began talking, leaving her first silent, then hurt, then angrily separated from him as if Sheila had found her way into their home and into their bed. And it comes and goes, silence, anger, fatigue, thoughts of Gram and Lena and her mother, all of them carrying on their days so quiet and simply, thoughts of leaving it all behind, everything here, and going home where the history and knowledge is solid.

Too much caffeine is not good, not good for the two of you. She makes an eight-cup pot and goes to sit on the screened porch, first reaching up to that rotted rented rafter to find two stale Virginia Slims all wrapped up in a baggie, given to her by Cindy just last weekend, one of the quiet days when she had returned Mark’s morning hug and clung to him with a brief feeling of hopefulness that she could put it all behind.

“He isn’t going to know if you smoke one little cigarette,” Cindy said, reaching into her Kenya bag, interrupting Virginia’s thoughts
of the wonderful mural she would paint for the nursery, friendly pastels. “I hate this fucking purse,” Cindy said while pulling out tube after tube of lipstick. “I wouldn’t even carry it if everybody else wasn’t. Here.” She handed Virginia the mashed up pack. “It’s got your name written right there on the pack,” Cindy laughed. “I hope you don’t mind that I still call you Ginny Sue. I mean if I suddenly up and went to college and switched off to Cynthia, you’d have a hard as hell time changing.” Cindy shook her head, those short mousse-spiked bangs not even moving. “I don’t know why you changed it to begin with. Go on, smoke up. Beats the hell out of having a fit.” Cindy plopped down on the door stoop. “I didn’t smoke during the Smoke-Out except two right before I went to bed. I sat there at the clinic and honest to God I got to feeling like I wanted to bite somebody. You know how it is to go without a cigarette till you want to bite somebody? I mean hard, leave teeth marks and everything. I smoked all the way through my pregnancy and look at my Chuckie, full of air, talks on the phone the tee-total time these days, runs track—and Lordy, baseball, there ain’t a thing up in his head but a soggy baseball.”

“Chuckie’s fine,” Virginia said and Cindy laughed, her thin eyebrows arched and Virginia thought how young Cindy looked sitting there in her cut-off jeans and fashionable cropped, paint-splashed-looking tee shirt. It could have been one of those days when they were teenagers and their families went to the beach, Cindy whistling and waving out of car windows to boys they passed while Virginia bent over and fumbled with the radio, painfully aware of her flat chest behind an oversized shirt and her hair too frizzy for a cute pixie cut like Cindy’s, her hair too dark for Sun-In.

“Chuckie is fine. That’s what I’m telling you,” Cindy said. “I probably could’ve smoked even more. They say it’ll make the baby smaller but that’s good, I mean, look at my stomach.” Cindy lifted her shirt, stood and patted her flat, tan stomach. “Smoke.” Cindy fumbled through her bag again and finally gave up and took one of the three that Virginia had removed from the pack.

“I’m going to save these.”

“Shoot,” Cindy said, blowing a short puff of smoke. “You think
what everybody did before Columbus was so great, well think now, my Grandma Tessy smoked a pipe, for years she smoked a pipe and every now and then would flat out chew tobacco. Look at your grandma, for godssakes, Emily dips snuff with her lips like this.” Cindy put her tongue down to make her chin stick out and kept talking that way. “Lena smokes more than I do.”

“But they didn’t know what it could do to them.”

“And now they do. In their eighties and they know. Grandma Tessy would know, too, if she was living but tobacco didn’t kill her; she lost her mind is what killed her.”

“Will you stop talking like that?” Virginia breathed a sigh of relief when Cindy lifted her tongue up towards her nose as if stretching it back in shape.

“Getting a little testy these days, Ginny Sue, better smoke up. Think about it, you say you love Saxapaw, over and over you talk of how much you love home which we all know is because you don’t live there, but aside from that, think about it. If it weren’t for tobacco we wouldn’t have public schools, that new shopping center they’re building which is going to have a Nautilus Center and a Baskin Robbins; we wouldn’t have the Duplex Cinema or the putt-putt range.”

“That’s not true,” Virginia laughed. “And Tessy did not lose her mind. Gram talked to Tessy the day that she died; Gram said she was sharp as ever. And Mama saw her that day and Tessy . . .”

“I know, I know, that dogwood tree story. You have told it so many times that I can say it by heart.”

“Well, it’s true,” Virginia stated, the same tone in her voice that she has always used when Cindy doubted the stories.

“Maybe Emily talked to Grandma Tessy and Emily said, ‘Hannah is going to plant herself a dogwood tree today,’ and then when your mama got to the hospital, Grandma said, ‘Hannah, I sure hope that dogwood lives.’”

“But it didn’t happen that way,” Virginia said adamantly.

Cindy could get to her so easily, had always been able to get to her. “My mother hadn’t told anyone that she had bought that tree. She was at Roses and for some reason she felt the urge to buy a dogwood tree and it was sitting right there in the back of that old
Chevrolet station wagon of ours when Mama went in the hospital.”

“And Grandma Tessy died and turned into a tree,” Cindy said, fumbling again in her bag and this time finding a cigarette.

“I have never said she turned into a tree!” Virginia said, enunciating each word and feeling her face go hot with each wide-eyed lift of Cindy’s eyebrows. “We just like to think that it was a sign that her spirit would go on.” Virginia was sorry as soon as the words got out.

“Well, I say that if Grandma Tessy wanted to be a tree during eternal life that she would have been a tree in our yard. I mean if I was going to be a tree, I’d be a tree in Chuckie’s yard so I could see what he was up to rather than being a tree in your baby’s yard.”

“Let’s stop.” Virginia stood, her hands pressed to her back. “Come see if you can wear these dresses of mine.”

“Now, if I had a husband when I died, I’d probably want to be planted in his yard so I’d know what he was up to.” Cindy brushed off the seat of her pants and followed Virginia inside. “Of course, Grandma Tessy wouldn’t have wanted to be in Granddaddy’s yard even if he had been living. You know there was that other man that Lena says Grandma had the hots for all those years.”

“You don’t know that,” Virginia said and pulled two sundresses from her closet. She hated seeing them there, size sevens that were snug last summer. “Try these on.”

“That’s a story, a family story.” Cindy lifted her shirt over her head. “Grandma got the hots for this young traveling man, traveling man, isn’t it sad about Ricky Nelson?” Virginia nodded and watched Cindy pull the first dress over her head without even taking off her shorts. “I can’t say that I blame her with my granddaddy old as the hills.”

“Gram says nothing ever happened between Tessy and that man.”

“Emily ain’t God. Besides, Lena says something
did
happen so who knows? My mama doesn’t. The whole world is going to pass her by while she plays solitaire and gets bigger.” Cindy reached back and pulled the zipper up. “I’m not going to wear a bra with this, waist is a little big but I’ll just wear a belt.” It made Virginia sick to see that material so loose and full around Cindy’s little wasp waist. “My mama might be a love child. How ‘bout that?”

“Your grandma knew that man long before your mama was born. Besides, nothing happened. Here,” Virginia handed Cindy the other dress, “they’re the same size, I’m sure it’ll fit.”

“Well, I want to try it anyway. This material is kind of cute looking, you know prissy and out of date. I might not like it.”